Science Lead, Intercept

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies - from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups - use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone's reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team 

This role is on the Intercept team within Public Goods at Stripe, which also houses Frontier. Respiratory viruses kill 1 million people a year, cost us $600B annually, disrupt everyday life, and periodically threaten civilization. Recent breakthroughs may make it possible to develop and deploy broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies that defend against common respiratory infections. Intercept is a $500M philanthropic initiative that aims to radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and eventually eliminate them altogether. It’s part of Public Goods at Stripe, which also houses Frontier.

Learn more about Intercept at our launch post and our website.

What you’ll do

Intercept is looking for a strategic, execution-oriented life sciences operator to join our team. 

We are laser-focused on making sure the portfolio of broad-spectrum preventatives needed to radically reduce the burden of respiratory viruses exists. Our goal is to advance 2+ products that meet our target product profile through Phase 2. We make both grants and investments, using the most capital-efficient tool to advance our target product profile.

This role will focus on sourcing and diligencing pipeline opportunities to select the most promising broad-spectrum preventatives that meet our target product profile (TPP), developing views on the most promising approaches, identifying new cutting edge areas of science, mapping key technical and clinical/regulatory bottlenecks, developing plans to de-risk them, and managing the grant/investment process from intake to diligence to award select to post-award monitoring. There will be a need to borrow from past product development experiences to expeditiously advance the portfolio, including mapping out known and new pathways for acceleration from discovery to FIH trials and to accelerate projects towards key discovery or product development inflection points. 

We need someone who can (1) evaluate the quality and value of the science for impact vs probability of success, and (2) zoom out to synthesize what that means for our capital deployment plan and long-term goals. A successful candidate will be action-oriented and comfortable working independently (vs. waiting to be told what to do) and a great communicator who can translate complex science for diverse audiences.

Intercept is a small team; you'll work with the entire team, under Intercept’s Head of Science, many partners, and wear many hats. You'll own specific outcomes end-to-end and have a chance to contribute to BSP strategy over time.

Responsibilities

• Expand the pipeline of BSP candidates. Engage all networks (researchers, investors, founders, funders, etc.) to source new ideas and technologies. 
• Diligence pipeline opportunities. Bring projects through early and deep / technical diligence: evaluating science quality, development plans, team, and fit against our TPP. 
• Develop points of view on technologies. Contribute to publishing a POV for the 5-10 most promising approaches (i.e., siRNA, T-cell vaccine, innate immune stimulators) and identify the key 'gating datapoints' that would make us kill or double down on that approach and when we'll get that datapoint (or if there is a gap).
• Build and maintain the CRM. Help ensure our CRM captures ~all known projects, and we have a process to systematically learn about/capture the best new projects early.
• Support our RFP and investment process. Help publish our initial RFP, highlighting promising-but-underloved areas we're especially excited to fund. Drive projects from intake through investment/grant execution. 
• Portfolio management. Monitoring + how we help / accelerate post investment. Help determine what would let the top projects in the field move 2x faster beyond funding.
• Map demand-side bottlenecks. Help map key stakeholders and address key evidence needs and bottlenecks across regulatory, clinical, recommendations, reimbursement and adoption/uptake.

Future opportunities for growth

• Lead investments independently. Grow into a more senior deal lead, owning deals from start to finish.
• Shape capital deployment. Contribute to our capital deployment plan informed by a clear POV of the most promising approaches.

Who you are

We're looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• Must have a PhD or MD in immunology and/or infectious disease with 5+ years of post-grad research experience (biotech, pharma, VC, or consulting) experience
• Demonstrated capacity to explore and evaluate a broad range of scientific topics and experience with scientific curation (e.g., oversight of a research portfolio, grant making experience, investment experience, etc.)
• Experience with portfolio management, including portfolio construction and post-award management 
• Ability to translate scientific diligence into strategic investment recommendations and a coherent capital deployment view
• Product development experience (and/or broad exposure via investing in or supporting companies)
• Experience with project management from launch to completion / project quarterback with a high openness to getting hands dirty
• Extremely self-directed, diligent, very fast learner, excellent communicator, very action oriented (vs talking about things)
• Compelled by our mission to greatly reduce the burden of and risks from respiratory viruses
• Public health / global health / biosecurity experience